Related papers: A Multicut Approach to Compute Upper Bounds for Ri…
Multi-period mean-variance optimization is a long-standing problem, caused by the failure of dynamic programming principle. This paper studies the mean-variance optimization in a setting of finite-horizon discrete-time Markov decision…
Trajectory optimization considers the problem of deciding how to control a dynamical system to move along a trajectory which minimizes some cost function. Differential Dynamic Programming (DDP) is an optimal control method which utilizes a…
We present a multilevel stochastic gradient descent method for the optimal control of systems governed by partial differential equations under uncertain input data. The gradient descent method used to find the optimal control leverages a…
We study a discrete-time multi-period portfolio optimization problem under an explicit constraint on the Deviation Conditional Value-at-Risk (DCVaR), defined as the excess of Conditional Value-at-Risk over expected terminal wealth. The…
We consider the problem of controlling a Markov decision process (MDP) with a large state space, so as to minimize average cost. Since it is intractable to compete with the optimal policy for large scale problems, we pursue the more modest…
Multi-stage stochastic programming is a well-established framework for sequential decision making under uncertainty by seeking policies that are fully adapted to the uncertainty. Often such flexible policies are not desirable, and the…
With the pervasiveness of Stochastic Shortest-Path (SSP) problems in high-risk industries, such as last-mile autonomous delivery and supply chain management, robust planning algorithms are crucial for ensuring successful task completion…
We propose a numerical recipe for risk evaluation defined by a backward stochastic differential equation. Using dual representation of the risk measure, we convert the risk valuation to a stochastic control problem where the control is a…
The popularity of Conditional Value-at-Risk (CVaR), a risk functional from finance, has been growing in the control systems community due to its intuitive interpretation and axiomatic foundation. We consider a nonstandard optimal control…
A power system unit commitment (UC) problem considering uncertainties of renewable energy sources is investigated in this paper, through a distributionally robust optimization approach. We assume that the first and second order moments of…
The problem of synthesizing stochastic explicit model predictive control policies is known to be quickly intractable even for systems of modest complexity when using classical control-theoretic methods. To address this challenge, we present…
Moment-based distributionally robust optimization (DRO) provides an optimization framework to integrate statistical information with traditional optimization approaches. Under this framework, one assumes that the underlying joint…
In this paper we present an algorithm to compute risk averse policies in Markov Decision Processes (MDP) when the total cost criterion is used together with the average value at risk (AVaR) metric. Risk averse policies are needed when large…
In this paper we develop an adaptive dual free Stochastic Dual Coordinate Ascent (adfSDCA) algorithm for regularized empirical risk minimization problems. This is motivated by the recent work on dual free SDCA of Shalev-Shwartz (2016). The…
This paper studies optimization of Conditional Value-at-Risk (CVaR) for Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) with finite state and action sets. It introduces the Dynamically augmented CVaR (DCVaR) risk measure and provides an algorithm for its…
Semidefinite programming (SDP) is a fundamental class of convex optimization problems with diverse applications in mathematics, engineering, machine learning, and related disciplines. This paper investigates the application of the…
We propose a new algorithm for solving multistage stochastic mixed integer linear programming (MILP) problems with complete continuous recourse. In a similar way to cutting plane methods, we construct nonlinear Lipschitz cuts to build lower…
In this paper, we consider a finite-horizon Markov decision process (MDP) for which the objective at each stage is to minimize a quantile-based risk measure (QBRM) of the sequence of future costs; we call the overall objective a dynamic…
We consider the stochastic shortest path (SSP) problem for succinct Markov decision processes (MDPs), where the MDP consists of a set of variables, and a set of nondeterministic rules that update the variables. First, we show that several…
The most common approaches for solving multistage stochastic programming problems in the research literature have been to either use value functions ("dynamic programming") or scenario trees ("stochastic programming") to approximate the…